The Disney process (Irrational Software)

I’m almost finished with Christopher Finch’s The Art of Walt Disney now, and it’s although quite fascinating, it only hints at Disney’s creativity and the “process” they were following as they made the films. In this book, as well as in other places, I’ve seen him being regarded as a “master planner”. Now, I’m sure he was a control freak, but the work on the movies was shared between his animators, and to me they seem to have had quite much freedom after all.

The work seems to have been structured around a core consisting of Disney himself, and a handful of people that were responsible for the music, the visuals, and so on. The entire machinery was no doubt coordinated using very high volumes of face-to-face communication, “model sheets” (guidelines for how to draw the specific characters), and written guidelines describing the mood or tone that should characterize the movie in production. They used rough “prototypes” to get a feel for each scene, which were discussed by a group of people before being done full-out. (I guess they did another round of prototypes if the first was deemed not good enough.)

Reading this book has convinced me that there’s much to learn for programmers in studying how movies are made. (See also my post Storyboards: a pragmatic tool for coordination.) Movies are very expensive to make, and a flop can often be disastrous for the movie company; yet, straightforward methods such as face-to-face communication, sketches, and storyboards, are seen as effective means of executing a project. In software, however, the tools must be advanced and expensive, or they are ridiculed; the obvious simple ones are often not even considered.

What I find interesting with Disney is that they, in the beginning, were working with something completely unprecedented: animation. Naturally, they must have been doing a lot of exploration. Because animation was expensive and involved a lot of work, they must have been constantly thinking of less expensive and simpler ways of achieving the result they wanted.

The early Disney movies were innovative in so many different ways. Besides being creative about the stories and its characters, how they were to be rendered on-screen from a huge number of stills, and so on, they also had to invent new types of paint, new sound systems, new camera rigs. You can safely say that they were creative about every aspect of their work. They obviously didn’t have many points of reference in history, but had to invent essentially everything along the way. In software, however, many people seem convinced that building software is like building bridges or houses, and therefore try to adopt processes from those worlds.

From reading The Art of Walt Disney, it’s obvious to me that the “Disney process” was based on exploration, communication, feedback (adaptation), freedom. Despite the image of Walt Disney as the master planner, I’m convinced that the animators were free to be creative both regarding the film and the aspects of the process that involved them. The team constantly tried new things, and met to discuss them and find out how they could improve things. Today in the software business, the followers of the agile movement talk about “agile” as if it would be something new. In fact, Disney were agile (because they had to).

Note: This post is merged from two different posts, that overlapped each other, so I have edited it quite heavily. The date of this post is the date of the more recent of the two originating posts.